A recent announcement over at Adobe Labs delivered the deeply disappointing news that the team working on native 64-bit versions of the bloated, creaking memory-hog Flash Player had given up after literally several tries.

Apparently oblivious to the fact that the whole world is keen to shake off the shackles of 32-bit mediocrity, they’ve stopped all development of the 64-bit versions of their increasingly irrelevant resource consumer until some unspecified future date.

Drawing up a list of criteria, and researching possible candidates, for a hardware purchase is an increasingly time-consuming
process. Especially if the device in question is to be running Linux. Increasingly, reviewers trot out page after page of
arbitrary statistics for things most of us will never attempt — instead of answering the important questions. Whilst it is
pleasing to know that a reviewer has successfully installed the device to a point where it can be demonstrated in this way,
som...

A few recent local changes included a restructuring of inbound mail delivery to include UCE (more frequently called spam) filtering using a combination of the venerable procmail and the increasingly impressive bogofilter.

Integration of bogofilter via procmail is covered in detail across the web, but it usually just a matter of adding a few lines to the top of your .procmailrc similar to:

Ever run snmpwalk on an SNMP-enabled device and been disappointed by the available information? There may well be a very simple reason for that.

The Net-SNMP implementation of the SNMP stack has some default settings that may be far from optimal in many cases. Specifically, the snmpwalk and snmpbulkwalk applications poll only a specific subset of the full MIB tree.

SNMP variables are arranged in a tree structure, each layer of which becomes more and more specific. Each node of this t...

After what seems like an age, Adobe has stopped pretending that the undeniable future of computing is 32-bit and built a native 64-bit Flash plugin for Linux. Although still an alpha release, it is at least the current version (10). If you’re using 64-bit Linux, and feel you’re missing out on a whole world of quality rich media, scoot along and grab it here.

For the hardcore masochists amongst you, there’s also a version for Solaris-x86 on the same page.

A recent upgrade to python 2.6 left a getmail cron job spewing warnings about a deprecated import of the sets module:

DeprecationWarning: the sets module is deprecated

Since python 2.4 the functionality of this module has been duplicated by built-in functions; a quick conversion is all that is required to quieten the new warnings. The patch is available here for those with a similar problem:

After the changes of last week things were still not quite right. The WET would still periodically fail, usually only for a few seconds, but sometimes for much longer. I began to suspect that this was an external problem; something in the house was interfering with the signal.

After a few days of monitoring the link, I could find no correlation between the intermittent failures and changes in the local environment. Back to the proverbial drawing board.

Following a recent rearrangement, I found a number of my computers on the wrong side of the lounge and a solid wall from the ADSL router. The layout of the room, and the solid floors and walls, ruled out running cables but with a wireless access point already in place, running the incomparable Tomato Firmware, the solution was obvious: Install a second wireless router (with Tomato naturally) and make the connection that way.

After writing so confidently about finding a fix for the earlier kernel problems with an Intel D945GCLF board, it returned with a vengeance shortly afterwards. Frustration finally won the day and a completely fresh install followed.

Gentoo had been the Linux distribution of choice on the previous box, but as speed was of the essence here (downtime was almost five days), something else was in order. That something turned out to be Arch Linux — might as well start with something completel...

To cut a long story short, acpi=ht isn’t the magic solution. Although much more stable than before, stable enough to get X windows up and running, it still fell foul of the same runaway kacpid problem eventually. It had to be another part of ACPI causing the problems. A quick look back through the dmesg output showed only very minimal portions of the ACPI code enabled. Immediately obvious was the output describing the LAPIC and IOAPIC setup. Both of these shared one very important fe...